Monday, July 19, 2010

Match.com Redux

A 29 year old woman, “Devka007” from Manhattan, sends me a “wink” on Match.com. Her profile reads, " I’m inventor, so my relationships with the person who is going to be my future husband will never die. I will always keep in reserve some wood to hold the fire of our love.” She’ll never have my wood, because I don’t have the cash she’s looking for. By her syntax and profile picture she could easily be Tatiana in the Bond film "From Russia With Love."

In 1996 I joined Match during its formative years when I lived in the loveless suburbs of NYC; if you were unmarried it was akin to having leprosy. So I electronically ventured out of the the NY ‘burbs and met a woman in Florida who claimed she was 44 years old. We shared a passion for astrology and developed a steady email relationship. It turns out that she was 64, had MS and was wheelchair bound. Yes, I did spent a weekend with her in a B&B in quaint Nantucket just for the adventure. I promise, it was strictly platonic and we had a wonderful time together.

Fast forward nearly 15 years and I’m back on the market. Match seems to engender the same zeitgeist as it did in the 90s – people always seeking, but rarely finding. After perusing hundreds of women’s profiles, which reminded me of browsing real estate comps in the South Boulder neighborhood where I just bought my house, I found one woman to be unique and compelling (to continue the analogy, every boring brick ranch in South Boulder under 600K is neither unique nor compelling). She emailed back to tell me how much she enjoyed my profile but that she’d already met a potential special someone. I'm hoping there's another woman out there who shares my twisted sense of humor and is wickedly playful and smart. But most are “honest, loyal, compassionate, caring” and want “long walks on the beach, kissing beneath the stars or candlelight dinners.” It seems as if each woman loves her family and friends, and is happy with herself if only the right man appeared to help them complete their lives. Some are even “baggage free.”

My profile is just as hypocritical as those of the women I’m writing about: show your game face to the world - emphasize the positives. Don’t expose your fatal flaws or wounds. I think everyone should have their ex-lover/husband/wife or therapist write an honest letter of recommendation that told you how their partner really was in relationship. Then you’d save months, maybe years of wondering what inner demons lurked inside that person and save all that heartbreak in the end. If only it were so easy.

Then there’s my non-carniverous diet; one of my close female friends informed me that she’d never date a vegetarian.Since I only know less than a handful of vegetarians including myself, the social liability is huge. One solution is to never cook at home, but order out every meal. That works in Manhattan quite well, where most refrigerators have a bottle of wine, a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda and some 3 day old Chinese food in a half opened cardboard box sitting on the middle shelf.

One woman writes a list of her negative traits: she needs 8-9 hours of sleep a night. I think she's my perfect match: I only sleep 5-6 hrs. a night and if she was dreaming peacefully in my bed I could have 3 or 4 hours of guilt-free downtime knowing my soulmate was just snoozing away. She posts that her liking hip-hop is a negative and I’d have to agree. She’d have to walk around the house with an I-pod and earbuds or I’d have to start a crash diet of Ice T and Kanye West.

And the 43 year old dog lover who “loves to get all gussied up for a night on the town as much as I love a t-shirt and jeans at a hole in the wall.” No one born after 1945 from any major metropolitan area says the word “gussied up” without sounding like someone’s great aunt from Wichita.

A 54 year old woman from Denver sends me a message inquiring about dancing at the St. Julien. Her photos reveal a classy woman - fit, confident, cosmopolitan and unselfconscious. Women over 50 often possess a magnetic beauty born of wisdom. Sadly, older women are often relegated to the post-menopausal cougar set, an unfortunate part of our culture in which wisdom and life experience is devalued for artifice and youth. However, at this late stage in the game, I'm thinking about kids, and I've already been with severalwomen older than me.

Every woman on Match in the Denver/Boulder area is “spiritual but not religious," except for the 31 year old from Colorado Springs who loves God (like most people in the Springs). She had the appearance of a Russian mail order bride whose wardrobe needs would bankrupt me on the first shopping trip. I guess I could borrow my friend’s black Beemer and with a good slathering of Gendarme cologne, and pretend I'm rich for one date. It’s just we’d have to hook-up at her house because once she saw the futon couch in my living room it would be all over.

But then, an email from a woman in Denver, a transplanted 44 year old Jewess whose path through life mirrors my own. She wrote, empathizing with the fact that I’d just left a very long term relationship, “I've been there, and learned that it was a gift as when you are completely comfortable being single, then you are ready to meet someone.” By that metric, I'm not ready. I hate being single. When I was virtually married I was intrigued by the freedom that my single friends possessed. Now, my empty bed and all too quiet house are unnerving.